Diane Duane: Deep Wizardry

“Kind of.” Kit got up on hands and knees and then again, swaying. “Come on. Keep your knees bent a little. And pick up your feet.”

It was a useful warning. Nita tripped over several breakers and sprawled each time, a sensation like doing a bellywhopper onto a waterbed, until she got her sea legs. Once past the breakers she had no more trouble, and Kit led her at a bouncy trot out into the open Atlantic.

They both came to understand shortly why not many people, wizards or otherwise, walk on water much. The constant slip and slide of the water under their feet forced them to use leg muscles they rarely bothered with on land. They had to rest frequently, sitting, while they looked around them for signs of the dolphin.

At their first two rest stops there was nothing to be seen but the lights on Ponquogue and Hampton Bays and West Tiana on the mainland, three miles north. Closer, red and white flashing lights marked the entrance to Shinnecock Inlet, the break in the long strip of beach where they were staying. The Shinnecock horn hooted mournfully at them four times a minute, a lonely-sounding call. Nita’s hair stood up all over her as they sat down the third time and she rubbed her aching legs. Kit’s spell kept them from getting wet, but she was chilly; and being so far out there in the dark and quiet was very much like being in the middle of a desert — a wet, hissing barrenness unbroken for miles except by the quick-flashing white light of a buoy or boat.

“You okay?” Kit said.

“Yeah. It’s just that the sea seems… safer near the shore, somehow. How deep is it here?”

Kit slipped his manual out of his windbreaker and pulled out a large nautical map. “About eighty feet, it looks like.”

Nita sat up straight in shock. Something had broken the surface of the water and was arrowing toward them at a great rate. It was a triangular fin. Nita scrambled to her feet. “Uh, Kit!”

He was on his feet beside her in a second, staring too. “A shark has to stay in the water,” he said, sounding more confident than he looked. “We don’t. We can jump—“

“Oh, yeah? How high? And for how long?”

The fin was thirty yards or so away. A silvery body rose up under it, and Nita breathed out in relief at the frantic, high-pitched chattering of a dolphin’s voice. The swimmer leaped right out of the water in its speed, came down, and splashed them both. “I’m late, and you’re late,” it gasped in a string of whistles and pops, “and S’reee’s about to be! Hurry!”

“Right,” Kit said, and slapped his manual shut. He said nothing aloud, but the sea’s surface instantly stopped behaving like a waterbed and started acting like water. “Whoolp!” Nita said as she sank like a stone. She didn’t get wet — that part of Kit’s spell was still working — but she floundered wildly for a moment before managing to get hold of the dolphin in the cold and dark of the water.

Nita groped up its side and found a fin. Instantly the dolphin took off, and Nita hoisted herself up to a better position, hanging from the dorsal fin so that her body was half out of the water and her legs were safely out of the way of the fiercely lashing tail. On the other side, Kit had done the same. “You might have warned me!” she said to him across the dolphin’s back.

He rolled his eyes at her. “If you weren’t asleep on your feet, you wouldn’t need warning.”

“Kit—“ She dropped it for the time being and said to the dolphin, “What’s S’reee? And why’s it going to be late? What’s the matter?”

“She,” the dolphin said. “S’reee’s a wizard. The Hunters are after her and she can’t do anything, she’s hurt too badly. My pod and another one are with her, but they can’t hold them off for long. She’s beached, and the tide’s coming in—“

Kit and Nita shot each other shocked looks. Another wizard in the area— and out in the ocean in the middle of the night? “What hunters?” Kit said, and “Your pod?” Nita said at the same moment.

The dolphin was coming about and heading along the shoreline, westward toward Quogue. “The Hunters,” it said in a series of annoyed squeaks and whistles. “The ones with teeth, who else? What kind of wizards are they turning out these days, anyway?”

Nita said nothing to this. She was too busy staring ahead of them at a long dark bumpy whale shape lying on a sandbar, a shape slicked with moonlight along its upper contours and silhouetted against the dull silver of the sea. It was the look of the water that particularly troubled Nita. Shapes leaped and twisted in it, shapes with two different kinds of fins. “Kit!”

“Neets,” Kit said, not sounding happy, “there really aren’t sharks here, the guy from the Coast Guard said so last week—“

“Tell them!” the dolphin said angrily. It hurtled through the water toward the sandbar around which the fighting continued, silent for all its viciousness. The only sound came from the dark shape that lay partly on the bar, partly off it — a piteous, wailing whistle almost too high to hear.

“Are you ready?”’ the dolphin said. They were about fifty yards from the trouble.

“Ready to what?” Kit asked, and started fumbling for his manual.

Nita started to do the same — and then had an idea, and blessed her mother for having watched Jaws on TV so many times. “Kit, forget it! Remember a couple months ago and those guys who tried to beat you up? The freeze spell?”

“Yeah…”

“Do it, do it big. I’ll feed you power!” She pounded the dolphin on the side. “Go beach! Tell your buddies to beach too!”

“But—“

“Go do it!” She let go of the dolphin’s fin and dropped into the water, swallowing hard as she saw another fin, of the wrong shape entirely, begin to circle in on her and Kit. “Kit, get the water working again!”

It took a precious second; and the next one — one of the longer seconds of Nita’s life — for her and Kit to clamber up out of the “liquid” water onto the “solid.” They made it and grabbed one another for both physical and moral support, as that fin kept coming. “The other spell set?” Nita gasped.

“Yeah — now!”

The usual immobility of a working spell came down on them both, with something added — a sense of being not one person alone, but part of a one that was somehow bigger than even Nita and Kit together could be. Inside that sudden oneness, she felt the “freeze” spell waiting like a phone number with all but one digit dialed. Kit said the one word in the Speech that set the spell free, the “last digit,” then gripped Nita’s hand hard.

Nita did her part, quickly saying the three most dangerous words in all wizardry — the words that give all of a wizard’s power over into another s hands. She felt it going from her, felt Kit shaking as he wound her power, her trust, into the spell. And then she took all her fright, and her anger at the sharks, and her pity for the poor wailing bulk on the sand, and let Kit have those too. The spell blasted away from the two of them with a shock like a huge jolt of static, then dropped down over the sandbar and the water for hundreds of feet around, sinking like a weighted net. And as if the spell had physically dragged them down, all the circling, hunting fins in the water sank out of sight, their owners paralyzed and unable to swim.

No wizardry is done without a price. Kit wobbled in Nita’s grip as if he were going to keel over. Nita had to lock her knees to keep standing. But both of them managed to stay upright until the weakness passed, and Nita looked around with grim satisfaction at the empty water. “The sharks won’t be bothering us now,” she said. “Let’s get up on the sandbar.”

It was a few seconds’ walk to where the dolphins lay beached on the bar, chattering excitedly. Once up on the sand, Kit took a look at what awaited them and groaned out loud. Nita would have too, except that she found herself busy breathing deep to keep from throwing up. Everywhere the sand was black and sticky with gobs and splatters of blood, some clotted, some fresh.